There have been numerous prior art device control systems, generally in the field of electrical energy consumption. Prior art control systems operate on a crude load shedding basis: they disable (shed) an energy consuming load when the predetermined demand threshold is reached and maintain the energy consuming load in the shed state for an extended period of time. Many of these prior art control systems suffer from a tendency to overreact to peak loads by shedding too many energy consuming loads for too extended a period of time, which reduces the operating efficiency of the customer's equipment which the system is designed to control. Other prior art control systems underregulate the energy consuming loads, which permits the demand to exceed the demand threshold too frequently. In all of these systems, the customer does not have the ability to control the system's risk determination parameters, which prevents the customization of the system to each application.